I've been trying to get this to work, Windows server 2003 r2, got service installed, vboxheadless never shows up in task manager, log doesn't have anything useful, have tried deleting out tmp, run, and lock directories, still no luck, hopefully someone can help.
Here's my ini, hope someone can help.

If it helps, watching the task manager I never see VboxHeadless start, but VBoxManage is obviously working (I changed what port I was using, then went into virtualbox and the change did work), so it is finding my virtual machine, it can access the vbox directory, just for some strange reason it won't run vboxheadless.

firecat53 wrote:Well, I've just given up on Virtualization on Vista, period. Vmware required the use of unsigned drivers on every reboot, virtualbox seemed to be unstable, and i couldn't get the auto start/shutdown working right, and neither dealt well with raw hard disk access. Still using Vbox on my Ubuntu laptop to run xp if I need it, but on VISTA it all just sucked! Ok, I tried to be green and virtualize one of our computers, but I'm gonna have to try again someday when I have a non-vista machine to use

Thanks for trying to help, mattz!

Scott

sorry for being no help with your problem, scott. i never tried the software on vista. nevertheless, there have been some reports of successful installs on vista (32bit) though...

The parameter "RunAtDomain=" MUST NOT BE EMPTY, OR ELSE VBoxVmService WILL FAIL!

If you are not running within a domain-controlled environment, paste your local computer's name here (e.g. "RunAtDomain=winserver" -- as always: no quotes here or anywhere else within the .INI-file!!!!)

The host-machine's hostname IS "winserver".There is an actual user-account on this local system: "vboxuser" (that's the login-name!)This user-account "vboxuser" has administrative privileges (or else VboxVmService will not run!). A password has to be set for the user' account! In my demo-case, this password is: "vboxsecret123". Passwords on Windows are case-sensitive!

I used the account "vboxuser" to create the virtual machines, that are to be controlled by the service. This user has to have FULL ACCESS to the Machines' configuration data as well as their .vdi-files! Any hardlinks in the filesystem point to the original VirtualBox.xml-file that was created for this user and is located at: "C:\Documents and Settings\VboxUser\.VirtualBox\VirtualBox.xml".

... just took 10 minutes replaying my previous step-by-step tutorial on win xp sp3 32bit with virtualbox 1.6.2. the service fired up the vm as expected running from LocalService (i hardlinked only to that directory, so i guess you can safely skip the steps 13 and 14a).

---cheers, mattz

---[ EDIT ]---
If you plan on using it with VBox's current version (1.6.2), there seems to be an issue with VBoxSDL.exe -- it just won't work. I'm trying to get in contact with the developer-team next week to figure out a solution to this problem. Yet you can always use VBoxHeadless and the vrdp-mode worked for me without any issues.

I have manged to successfully run a virtual Debian on my XP box to access my Linux SoftRAID with the help of VBoxVmService. So everything works fine as long as I use startup_cli or when I start the service manually.
When the service has been started automatically the first time on startup it works well, too. But when I restart my machine, the service is not started again and never will. The reason for this seems to be a remaining file in the "run" folder during shutdown. I find several files in the temp, run and lock folders. That leads me to the assumption that the service is not stopped correctly.
Does any one else has this problem, or even better, has a solution for this behaviour? How can I make sure that the service is stopped during shutdown correctly?

rename "startup.exe" to "startup.bak", so that it can not be found or triggered (or move it out of the installation folder temporarily).

Shut down, then restart your machine. Open up the Virtualbox GUI and you will see the machines current state.

Remember: The option "poweroff" equals a cable-cut on a running system. I would ALWAYS recommend "savestate". The virtualbox Gui will tell you exactly what state your machine is currently in.

have you tried issuing the startup_cli.exe instead of startup.exe in your .INI-File? Technically they do the exact same thing - but if one version works for you and the other doesn't, I think it would be worth a shot...

I am currently in overload with projects so I am *not* working on a maintenance release at the moment nor do I have the time to track possible problems within the application ... sorry guys - i guess for the moment it's just a question of luck whether vboxvmservice will run with your system setup or not...

cheers, mattz

[edit] the runfiles will be deleted last in the shutdown process, so it might be that your system just doesnt stay active long enough to kill all files.
I was planning to add a "brute force clearup" option to the service on startup, since i encountered similar problems on two or three machines. I just didn't find an option to prioritize the vboxvmservice to be an "early shutdown candidate" within a reboot or halt sequence yet. any suggestions here, anyone?